You’ve got to give B.C. Conservative Russ Hiebert credit for persistence. The South Surrey-White Rock-Cloverdale MP has spent nearly four years navigating his private member’s bill on union financial disclosure through the House of Commons and (mostly) the Senate.

On Tuesday, Parliament’s upper chamber finally passed Bill C-377 and Governor General David Johnston signed it into law.

The new law will force public- and private-sector unions to disclose nearly all their financial activities. Needless to say, union bosses are enraged.

Hiebert’s bill will require unions to make detailed disclosures to the Canada Revenue Agency, disclosures that will then be posted online for anyone and everyone to see.

Most of what has to be in the unions’ new statements to the taxman is pretty innocuous: amounts spent on office operations, conferences and conventions, education and training, certification drives and collective bargaining.

What has union bigwigs so upset is that they must now also reveal how much of their members’ dues go to political activities, lobbying efforts, activism (such as funding environmental groups) and “employee compensation in excess of $100,000.”

Even unions that represent oil and pipeline workers like to give money to political parties opposed to oilsands development and pipeline construction.

For instance, Alberta members of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union (now part of the super-union Unifor) have long suspected that at least part of NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s anti-oilsands junket through Alberta in 2012 was underwritten using their dues.

They are convinced several local events were paid for by their union so the NDP didn’t have to use party funds. They disbelieve union leaders’ assurances, but they have no way of proving otherwise.

Hiebert’s Bill C-377 might give them a way in the future to uncover any donations from union coffers that threaten the long-term viability of members’ jobs.

Canadian unions collect nearly $4.5 billion annually in dues, but almost no one imagines all that cash goes to negotiating contracts or establishing benevolent funds for injured workers.

Even before Hiebert’s campaign for union accountability, the Income Tax Act forbid unions from levying dues for “any purpose not directly related to the ordinary operating expenses of the … union.”

So the suspicion has long been that unions declare millions spent on anti-Conservative campaigning (both at the federal and provincial levels) as “education” or “general union activities.”

How, for instance, does the Working Families coalition in Ontario, a labour front that has been a major actor in the last two provincial elections, justify the millions it has spent on ads that oppose the Tory opposition while also, indirectly, endorsing the governing Liberals?

Union leaders opposed to C-377 have offered a laughable defence of their current financial accountability by insisting that members’ interested in how their dues are spent need only attend union meetings, come to union headquarters to view financial statements or (my favourite) “read union newsletters” to discover the truth.

But to wade through most union financial statements would require the skills of a forensic accountant, not to mention the guts of a prizefighter to sit at union HQ pouring over the books while intimidating union executives stare over members’ shoulders.

Will this law radically alter unions’ business models? Probably not. But it may make members a little more aware of what their leaders make (it’s more like company execs than working stiffs) and what job-destroying causes their unions are backing.

The federal Tories have justified these new transparency standards by pointing out that dues are tax deductible, which in effect makes unions publicly subsidized.

Fair enough. But thousands of businesses across the country receive billions of taxpayer subsidies, too – direct and indirect. Let’s now force them to be similarly transparent or to give up their subsidies.

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